A year post-derecho, some lessons are still being put into action

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Kenneth K. Lam/Baltimore Sun

A storm response team member of Florida's PDA works on an electrical pole at the 700 block of Hollen Road to restore electrical power to the area, which has lost power for almost a week since last Friday's storm.

A storm response team member of Florida's PDA works on an electrical pole at the 700 block of Hollen Road to restore electrical power to the area, which has lost power for almost a week since last Friday's storm. (Kenneth K. Lam/Baltimore Sun)

While dangling from a crane, Arborist Sam Mays, of Owings Mills, works to clear a cherry tree that fell on electrical wires on the 700 block of Hollen Road in the Lake Walker neighborhood. The fallen tree has caused power outage to area residents for almost a week since last Friday's storm.

While dangling from a crane, Arborist Sam Mays, of Owings Mills, works to clear a cherry tree that fell on electrical wires on the 700 block of Hollen Road in the Lake Walker neighborhood. The fallen tree has caused power outage to area residents for almost a week since last Friday's storm. (Kenneth K. Lam/Baltimore Sun)

Arborists Sam Mays, left, of Owings Mills, and brother Hank Mays, work on clearing the stump of a cherry tree that fell on electrical pole, left, causing an outage for residents at the 700 block of Hollen Road for almost a week.

Arborists Sam Mays, left, of Owings Mills, and brother Hank Mays, work on clearing the stump of a cherry tree that fell on electrical pole, left, causing an outage for residents at the 700 block of Hollen Road for almost a week. (Kenneth K. Lam/Baltimore Sun)

Vanessa Burnham, right, a residents of the 700 block of Hollen Road reacts after hearing from BGE crewman Jesse Palmisano, left, that her home's electrical power might be restored today. The neighborhood has been without electrical power for almost a week since last Friday's storm.

Vanessa Burnham, right, a residents of the 700 block of Hollen Road reacts after hearing from BGE crewman Jesse Palmisano, left, that her home's electrical power might be restored today. The neighborhood has been without electrical power for almost a week since last Friday's storm. (Kenneth K. Lam/Baltimore Sun)

BGE foreman Bob Houck wipes away sweat while waiting for tree service contractors to clear a cherry tree that fell on electrical wires on the 700 block of Hollen Road in the Lake Walker neighborhood. The fallen tree caused power outage to the area for almost a week since last Friday's storm.

BGE foreman Bob Houck wipes away sweat while waiting for tree service contractors to clear a cherry tree that fell on electrical wires on the 700 block of Hollen Road in the Lake Walker neighborhood. The fallen tree caused power outage to the area for almost a week since last Friday's storm. (Kenneth K. Lam/Baltimore Sun)

After last June's derecho — and Tropical Storms Irene and Isabel before it — Rodgers Forge resident Nancy Slaterback was fed up with power outages.

"The problem's getting worse. It's not getting better," she told members of the Public Service Commission at a hearing on the derecho blackouts last summer that left her and many of her neighbors without power for the better part of a week, among 1 million outages statewide.

A year later, the outrage has faded, but there is still work to be done. The 67-year-old has been considering buying a generator that could power her entire house, including a machine that treats her sleep apnea. "You're talking maybe $10,000," she said recently.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is procuring a generator for a key facility that lost power. State energy officials are weighing how to better equip nursing homes for outages and how to avert gas station outages like those in parts of New Jersey paralyzed by superstorm Sandy. And utilities continue work to protect the electricity grid.

Emergency responders and utility officials say they are better prepared for the next outage emergency, having made efforts to shorten the duration of outages and better locate vulnerable residents who might be suffering in the dark.

"It's going to be an ongoing thing as we learn from this," said Edward McDonough, a Maryland Emergency Management Administration spokesman. "Hopefully, we're not going to need to use it."

Many of the lessons quickly became apparent after the storm blew through about 11 p.m. last June 29.

Forecasts earlier that day called for a chance of afternoon or evening thunderstorms, and temperatures soared to 103 degrees at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport. Storms heading eastward from Illinois and Indiana typically would not maintain their strength crossing over the Appalachians, but the hot, steamy air over the East Coast made this no typical storm, fueling its severity.

It morphed into a meteorological phenomenon that entered the lexicon of millions of people from Chicago to Baltimore — a derecho. Named for the Spanish word meaning "straight ahead," derecho storms are rare and hard to predict. They form a long and powerful squall line that brings straight-line wind gusts upward of 60 mph across an area hundreds of miles long and wide.

The storm's winds wreaked carnage across the region, snapping limbs and uprooting trees, strewing them across power lines and onto vehicles and houses with deadly force. Falling trees killed a 25-year-old man as he drove a sport utility vehicle in Catonsville and an elderly Silver Spring woman sheltered in her home.

Another death linked to the derecho occurred this month. Lee Bowman, a 62-year-old Northeast Baltimore resident, was paralyzed from the shoulders down when he was struck by a falling tree while clearing storm debris July 8 of last year. He died June 13 of an infection stemming from a bedsore.

Power outages for Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. customers peaked at 430,000 a few hours after the storm passed, and more than 762,000 customers lost power at some point over the nine days after the storm hit. The average outage lasted 38 hours, but some were as long as a week.

At NASA Goddard's 1,300-acre Greenbelt campus, the storm felled trees, cutting two of three sources of power. Scientists working on the James Webb Space Telescope, a major project set to replace the Hubble Space Telescope in 2018, were in the midst of testing equipment when the lights went out.

Outages are something they are always on guard for — in a massive clean room where they are building elements of the telescope, lighted signs on the wall warn of approaching storms. Various levels of storm alerts advise the scientists not to start certain activities that are best not interrupted by a power outage.

In the case of the derecho, no damage was done and the equipment being tested was not anything bound for space, said Jason Hylan, lead mechanical engineer for Goddard's efforts on the telescope. A backup power generator for the clean room is still being procured.

Meanwhile, work continues to prevent future storms from rocking Slaterback's Rodgers Forge neighborhood. She received a letter in late June informing her that more power lines would be buried as part of what BGE calls "selective undergrounding." Many called for a massive effort to bury the electricity grid to protect it from falling trees; the utility pursues the practice where the cost is worth the benefit.

That work is focused on a wooded area near Stanmore Road and Stevenson Lane, where utility crews and tree experts determined that even aggressive trimming was not enough to prevent outages.

"What we found is especially during some of these severe events, even if you trim back, you still have some of these large black locust trees with shallow roots that can take the wires down," said Mike Garzon, a BGE reliability project manager.

Other projects don't just address issues that arose during the derecho, but natural disasters elsewhere.

Gov. Martin O'Malley's budget for the fiscal year starting Monday includes $1.7 million for the Maryland Energy Administration to help gas stations along emergency routes prepare for widespread outages. The effort will likely include prewiring gas stations for backup generators, said Abigail Hopper, O'Malley's chief energy adviser and executive director of the energy administration.

The funding was inspired by problems that arose in New Jersey after superstorm Sandy, when gas was rationed because so many stations were without power.

The state is also exploring regulations for facilities as diverse as nursing homes, dialysis centers and wastewater treatment plants to ensure that they are all prepared for extended outages, Hopper said.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and the county executives of six surrounding jurisdictions complained after the derecho that utilities would not provide block-by-block information on outages. The utilities cited privacy concerns. While state energy regulators gave them a preliminary OK to release such details during superstorm Sandy, a permanent plan to decide what information can be released and when awaits a decision.

Other changes to improve response to mass power outages are already in place.

At MEMA, for example, officials learned the importance of compiling a list of nursing homes and other vulnerable facilities. Various agencies kept tabs on their facilities, but it wasn't until the past year that MEMA established a centralized list, McDonough said.

BGE, hammered by complaints about crews that appeared idle as outages lingered, established new policies that could shorten the length of many outages.

A year ago, crews needed to wait for approval from headquarters before performing certain tasks, which caused backlogs, said Steve Woerner, BGE's chief operating officer. Now field workers have been trained to sign off on the tasks themselves.

The utility also altered procedures for repairing downed lines, allowing crews to make emergency repairs restoring power for a portion of affected customers. Such stopgap repairs may add time and steps to fully restoring power for everyone, but could calm some frustrated customers.

"You can have overall great reliability and still have pockets of poor reliability," Woerner said. "We're trying to make sure nobody is that far from the system average."

Historic flooding and the coldest temperatures in decades made weather headlines in Baltimore in 2014. Rainfall records were set in April and August, and after a frigid winter, the summer was comfortable and fall cool. The year is expected to be the coolest and wettest here in years.